The present invention relates to guardrail safety systems in general, and more particularly to guardrail safety systems capable of safely decelerating a vehicle that impacts a guardrail end terminal.
Guardrails are provided along many highways to protect drivers and passengers from hazards, such as trees, cliffs, and overpass stanchions, that can cause injury or death if a vehicle were to veer off the road. The end of the guardrail, however, can itself be a hazard when a vehicle impacts the terminal end of a guardrail. Such a collision can result in the vehicle being impaled by various parts of the end terminal system, such as the guardrails and posts. This can, and has, resulted in catastrophic bodily injury or death to drivers and passengers of vehicles. In fact, there have been reported cases of guardrails piercing straight through the full length of a vehicle after a collision. See, e.g., Aaron M. Kessler, Critical Tests to Begin on Highway Guardrail Banned in Most States, N.Y. Times, Dec. 9, 2014, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/business/critical-tests-to-begin-on-highway-guardrail-banned-in-most-states.html? r=0. Furthermore, the force of a collision with the end of a guardrail can project vehicle and guardrail debris onto the highway that create the possibility for peripheral accidents and injuries.
Various guardrail end terminals have been designed to ameliorate the risks of a collision by decelerating the vehicle and controlling the expulsion of guardrail and vehicle parts into adjacent highway traffic. Many of these conventional “safe” guardrail end terminals have been installed along highways around the country. Unfortunately, the safety mechanisms of conventional guardrail end terminals fail regularly on impact, resulting in hundreds of people each year being maimed or killed by parts of a guardrail piercing the vehicle, or by parts of a guardrail being ejected into highway traffic. As a result, more than 30 different states in the U.S.A. have banned one conventional guardrail end terminal which has been determined to be unsafe. Id.
Compounding the difficulties of improving the safety of guardrail end terminals is the fact that there is a substantial amount of infrastructure already in place. As a result, the cost of fully replacing installed faulty guardrail end terminals with an entirely new system may be prohibitively expensive.
There is a clear need for an improved design for guardrail end terminals that more consistently and effectively protect highway travelers, while also being economically feasible to implement.